(d) Third Petition -. ' Tliy will be done.' This may be described as the dominant note of the Lord's Prayer. The petitions that precede lead up to this, and those that follow must be brought into iiarmony with it. We frequently use these words as if they were nothing more than a prayer of submission and resigniation in the day of sorrow, an echo of tiie Sa\dour's cry in the Garden of Geth- semane (Mt 26^" :). And no doubt this is part of their meaning, and one of the uses to which they may be applied. They are a cry to God to enable us to bear what He sees fit to send, and to make us meek and patient under His chastening hand. But while tliis is implied in the petition, it is not its first intention. The added words, ' as in heaven, so on earth,' should keep us right here, since from heaven all sorrow and sighing liave fled away. This is the prayer of active rather tlian of passive obedience, an obedience like that of God's angels who e.\cel in strength and do His command- ments. Before we think of Jesus in the garden of shadows, we should think of Him as He sat by the well of Sychar and said to His disciples, ' My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to accomplisii his work' (Jn 4**). When we pray this prayer we are asking that we and all meii, bemg delivered from the spirit of wilfulness, may attain to a joyful alacrity like that of angels in doing the will of God.
(c) Fourth Petition.—' Give us this day our daily {iTTioiKTiov) bread.' We pass now from the God^vard to the manward aspects of the prayer. The first petition of this second group shows that it is right and proper to pray for material as well as %r spiritual blessings. The prayer is not to be spirit- ualized, with most of the Fathers, into a request for the Bread of Life ; it is literal bread, bread for bodily sustenance, that Jesus means us to ask for.
The one expositor>- difficulty of this petition lies in the word =T«>:/^<(>;, which has heen called ' the most untranslatable word in the I\T. It appears here (in both Jit. and Lk.) for the first time in Gr. literature, and ^rithin the NT occurs nowhere else Of the three principal rendering's— ' daily ' (EV text), 'for the coming day' (RVm), and 'needful' (Amer. RVm, alternat.)— there is least to be said for the first, familiar as it is. It repro- duces the Old Lat. quotidianum, but finds no support in etymo- logy, and may be regarded perhaps as nothina: more than a mess suggested by what the sense of the passage appeared to require For the coming day ' is more likely from the etymological point
of view (i'TiciCiFios fr. y, '■•zio'Ca-a, [sc. s5ttE'p<ic]= ' the coming day,' fr. £T.«v, pres. part, of stsjui [s<!"-'. ' to go or come']), but seems out of keeping with Christ's teaching elsewhere in the Sermon on the Slount (ilt 6**). If this rendering is accepted, Chase's yiew ('Lord's Prayer in Early Church,' Texts and SUi.dies, Cam- bridge [1591], in loc.) is plausible, that the word was a liturgical insertion intended to adapt the prayer for use at evening ser- vice. In tlie morning the petition would run, according to its original form, 'Give us this da.\ our bread,' while in the evening there would be substituted, ' Give us our bread for the coming day.' Cf. Lk.'s ' day by day,' which obviates any inappropriate- ness in asking at night for the bread of the day.
Perhaps, however, there is most to be said for the view that irrio-Ja-iK is a word specially coined, after the analogy of the LXX T-pioCa-to; (Ex 195, Dt 76 142 2618, for Heb. n^jc, EV 'peculiar.' It is evidentlj' derived from T6c/o!/o-.'a = wealth, abundance [t£^, and oitria.]). i-rsnia-m; in contrast to ■Ttpit,C(riti; would thus denote what is needful or sufficient as distinguished from what is abun- dant or superfluous. If this is the proper rendering of the word, the petition would correspond almost exactly with the prayer of .\gur, ' Feed me with the food that is needful for me ' (Pr 30S RV).*
(/) Fifth Petition. — 'Forgive us our debts {6(p€i\r]ij.aTa), as we forgive our debtors.' Lk. has 'sins' (d.aapri'as), while in the explanatory addition given i)y Mt. (vv."- ^^j 'trespasses' (wapaTTTdj/jiara) is used — the word which in tiie Bk. of Com. Prayer is substituted for ' debts ' in the Lord's Praj-er itself. ' Debts ' is particularly suggestive. In the fir.st place, it reminds us of the personal account- abilitj' to God into which we are brought by every act of sin. We may look at sin in many asjDects — ■ as the transgression of an ideal law, as a wrong done to our neighliour, as a harm inflicted upon ourselves. But most solemn of all is the thouglit tiiat sin makes us debtors before God, debtors who have wasted our Lord's money and are called to render account. But further, ' debts ' reminds us of a class of sins we are most apt to forget — our sins of omission. It is Avhen we ask ourselves, ' How mucli owest thou unto thy Lord ? ' that tiie full extent of oui' shortcoming begins to appear. Per- haps we have striven hard against wrongdoing, but what of the things we have left undone ? In Christ's great vision of the Judgment, ' Inasmuch as ye did it not ' is the jireface to the sentence of condemnation (Mt 25'*^).